Thanksgiving Day, 1950, the troops of the US Army's X Corps were pushing north through the Korean peninsula at a breakneck pace, spearheading a United Nations force sanctioned to drive North Korea's invading Communist army out of democratically-held South Korea. If all went according to plan, General McArthur had assured the President that US troops would be home by Christmas. But all did not go according to plan. Within days of the assault, 10,000 US Marines, along with units of US Army and UN troops, found themselves completely surrounded by more than 85,000 Chinese soldiers in the craggy Taebaek Mountains encircling the Chosin Reservoir. "The Chinese military forces are committed in great and ever-increasing strength," a stunned McArthur wrote to the Pentagon. "We face an entirely new war." Over the next two weeks, in temperatures that often plunged to twenty degrees below zero, U.S. troops engaged in intense and bloody combat as they fought their way through the mountain passes. The Battle of Chosin recounts the conflict in intimate detail through the eyewitness accounts of participants, presenting a harrowing narrative of combat and survival in the first major military clash of the Cold War.